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Branding...."radio.com" is a huge, huge asset in today's world. But it's still a leap of faith on whether the general population (OK, sheeple) will abandon direct broadcast in favor of the convenience of accessng content online. It'll be the smartphone generation that will really force the change away from broadcast. Hope not, but....

I've been out of radio almost 10 years now, but, even then, we frequently had conversations about having to stop thinking of ourselves as transmitters and start becoming entertainment and content providers. The challenge, of course, is how to do that and make a profit off of it. The last company where I worked traded all of its streaming out. So, having a podcast version of our popular shows was pretty much out of the question. TuneIn, of course, will now host your podcasts, but that wasn’t an option then. To the best of my knowledge, that company still doesn’t do much more than deliver its on-air stream over multiple platforms.

As others have mentioned, Entercom is almost certainly planning to use Radio.com to leverage its popular shows across several different formats and platforms. After all, Radio.com has hosted CBS podcasts for a long time. Having a transmitter is just another way to deliver your content.

There's a difference. One (morse code) is guys holding onto old technology because they want to. They either grew up with it, or prefer using it for some emotional reason.

The other case is where someone doesn't want to load up the memory in their phone with a program they'll only use now and then.

Memory has gotten cheaper and cheaper over the last 20 years. Pretty soon you'll have unlimited memory...so it won't matter...but you can still make some kind of statement if you want. Your access to stations, (even those you use "now and then") will not be limited to memory.

Originally Posted by Kent

I think his point was that loading up the memory and space on your smartphone is rapidly becoming a non-issue. I haven’t had a 16 GB smartphone in almost two years. My current one is 128 GB, and my wife has a 64 GB iPhone.

The iPhones can store everything I could possibly want, and the iPad rarely needs my intervention and can decide on its own which app(s) to offload anytime I download something new.

As others have mentioned, Entercom is almost certainly planning to use Radio.com to leverage its popular shows across several different formats and platforms. After all, Radio.com has hosted CBS podcasts for a long time. Having a transmitter is just another way to deliver your content.

The main thing to know about podcasts is it really doesn't matter who hosts them, because the majority of users will download them from iTunes. That's what our statistics say. On average 75% get their podcasts from iTunes.

But yes, Entercom will use Radio.com as a platform for a lot of original content, such as new artist features or album premiers for currents-based stations, or deep cuts shows for classic stations. All the things that typically don't work on air will appear online in some way. That's where it will reach an on-demand audience.

I think his point was that loading up the memory and space on your smartphone is rapidly becoming a non-issue. I haven’t had a 16 GB smartphone in almost two years. My current one is 128 GB, and my wife has a 64 GB iPhone. Plus, I have an old 16 GB iPad, and iOS has been able to offload apps without deleting my data since at least iOS 11, which came out last year. So, I don’t have to worry about space much at all anymore. The iPhones can store everything I could possibly want, and the iPad rarely needs my intervention and can decide on its own which app(s) to offload anytime I download something new.

Point taken. But not everyone wants to load up a device with stuff that they don't use. I have TuneIn on my Kindle. I never use it anymore. I have a 2 year old laptop and the half terabyte of memory is nowhere near loaded, but some apps as well as the OS clog it up from time to time while running or updating, and some have advertising that seems to come with them.

Win10 (an OS which works well -- not an app, admittedly) has all sorts of junk attached that XP never had -- all that advertising that comes with many of its apps. That is a new trend in apps, too -- ads. It's like the modern version of telemarketing.

It's all a matter of choice, and people will use high resource apps if they use them a lot. For maybe one or two radio stations they don't listen to all that much? Perhaps not. And if the app has some bloatware attached -- perhaps not.

Then again, you may be right. With new phones, maybe people don't care.

I don't blame Entercom for abandoning TuneIn for Radio.com which they acquired. Why wouldn't they? I'm also surprised that adding the radio.com app to a phone is an issue. I quit replacing phones so often and just do it when the specs on my old one become inadequate. My Samsung S-6 is still serviceable. No whiz bang camera or anything special but it's fine. I added the radio.com app and still have plenty of room. But here's the thing: I don't listen to radio on my phone very often. I've been using our 3 Google Home Assistants for 90% of my listening which in home or in-office. I call for any station in the U.S. (just about) and Google knows if it's on iHeart or TuneIn. But now, when I call for an Entercom station, it just says "it isn't available or can't be played right now." This must be pretty confusing for people who don't know what happened.

I noticed this for the first time today. So I searched online for stories including various combinations of the words entercom, radio.com, alexa, google assistant etc and turned up ... nothing. Entercom's hundreds of stations just dropped off Google's Assistant (which has 27% of the smart speaker market and is gaining on Alexa) and it's apparently not newsworthy or even blogworthy. I had to dig inside a Google Web developers forum to confirm that there's no way to listen to Entercom stations on my Google Home Assistant yet and there is no known date when it will be possible. So again, I completely understand why Entercom did it but if this goes on for very long, I see Entercom losing online listeners who won't know to try again in a week or a month or a year.